Video content (e.g., television shows, pay-per-view (PPV) content, video-on-demand (VOD) content, etc.) may be delivered and selected in several ways. For example, television channels may be broadcast to subscribers' homes and a channel may be viewed via subscriber selection from a channel lineup. Time shifted Internet protocol (IP) television (IPTV) emulates this broadcast delivery over IP, which overcomes bottlenecks associated with lower speed access networks (e.g., twisted pair, digital subscriber line (DSL), wireless, etc. networks) by sending content during time periods when there is spare capacity, or sending content at a rate slower than the playback rate as constrained by an access network bandwidth.
However, IPTV provides a large number of channels that make user selection difficult. Digital video recorders (DVRs) may be used to record video content so that the video content may be viewed at a later time. DVR-based recording, however, is largely limited to tuning to a particular channel (e.g., from a channel lineup), and selecting a time period for recording the particular channel.
Over the top (OTT), or IP unicast, delivery of video content may provide video content to any connected device (e.g., televisions, computers, gaming consoles, smart phones, etc.). OTT video content may include, for example, pre-recorded video content (e.g., television episodes), and content associated with video portals provided by content providers, such as Hulu™, YouTube™, CNN, etc. OTT delivery provides near real time transmission (e.g., with an adaptive transmission rate) of video content, with limited buffering. Furthermore, video content requests are directed to content servers in order to optimize criteria or meet constraints associated with the video content requests. The content servers may optimize the requests' criteria or meet constraints based on performance (e.g., latency), minimum topology hops, historical server load (e.g., sessions, throughput, etc.), economic cost, etc. Content delivery networks (CDNs) may use a variety of mechanisms to determine optimality and/or constraints associated with video content requests. For example, CDNs may configure and transfer address assignments into CDN trackers; may configure domain name system (DNS) redirection; may use load balancers to distribute traffic between servers in a site or between sites; may use quasi-static application layer traffic optimization and pay for performance (P4P) approaches to provide feedback; and may use heuristic algorithms.
However, OTT delivery of video content over a routed network can make use of only limited topology and load information and must convey the content at the playback rate in near real time and only at the requested rate and quality. Furthermore, OTT delivery requires manual (or operations support systems (OSS) application-based) configuration of consistent information in multiple servers. Thus, true optimization is difficult to achieve in OTT delivery of video content and OTT delivery may create network congestion and/or additional operator expense to provision the network for peak load.